Sunday, 15 January 2017

All in the Execution: A Review of 'Emma: A Victorian Romance, Omnibus 1' by Kaoru Mori (2002 Manga)

Emma:
A Victorian Romance shows it’s all in the
execution. Open a compendium of stock-plots to ‘forbidden love, interclass’,
and you’ll find Emma’s outline. Yet
Kaoru Mori avoids going through the motions, imbuing an old story with calm
life.

When William, a member of the landed gentry,
visits his former governess in London, he grows infatuated with her maid, Emma.
Although Emma catches all the young men’s eyes, William may have caught her
eye, too. But, as they say, in Victorian England there are two nations, the
Upper-classes and the Lower, and never shall the two cross. Can William and
Emma’s sapling love survive the boot of propriety and practicality?

The difference between a ‘tale as old as
time’ and a ‘done-to-death bore’ rests in the execution. Love between upstairs
and downstairs is the go-to forbidden love story. Emma: A Victorian Romance does not subvert the formula, it merely
imbues it with enough life it seems more naturalistic than formulaic. It also avoids
mounting a platitudinous soapbox by making classism the story’s narrative conflict,
not its theme.

Obstacles to William and Emma’s love are
external, not internal. Societal beliefs about class distinction threaten to
keep our lovers apart, not selfishness, bull-headedness, nor mismatches in the
personalities’ of our lovers. The only internal obstacles are their superficial
internalistions of class prejudice. One of them will think, ‘Oh, it cannot work,
for I am here and my love is there.’ Going on this first omnibus (which may be
premature, as there are five), our lovers’ need not overcome personal
short-comings; they must overcome classist prejudice. Certainly, overcoming
prejudice is a transformation (imagine the racist who becomes an civil rights
campaigner), but it would be a massive one for these characters. Due to the
limits of human empathy, author effort, and reader taste, characters in
historical fiction tend not to be that historical. At base, William and Emma
are modern humans in a period setting. I get the sense that William and Emma’s
classism is not weaved into their worldview, as it would be for a real
Victorian (and, indeed, for William’s family). Their classism seems an easily
dispelled delusion, rather than fundamental belief.

Emma is a subdued love story. But while it does not plunge the reader
into roaring rushes of romance, it is idealised. Emma and William’s meeting is
serendipitous: he meets her while visiting his old governess. Neither misunderstandings
nor crossed-purposes trammel their courtship. Love rivals appear, for both William
and Emma, but, for now, they lack the allure to pull apart our lovers. Yet ‘love
story’ fits this tale more than ‘romance’, or at least better than ‘romance’
meaning ‘bodice-ripper’. Our lovers’ first kiss is shot from behind, and tame
besides. They are effectively in private when they kiss, and they only kiss.
(Albeit, their ‘private’ place is a closed-for-the-night public place, but in a
roaring romance that would be immaterial.) Sexual attraction does not burst
from the page; chaste tenderness marks their love, like a Victorian love story.

Mori’s decompressed plotting fits the story’s
easy-going nature. Why depict in two panels what she could in two pages? In her
afterword to the first volume, Mori self-deprecatingly says the only reason
Emma takes a page to put on her glasses is: ‘It’s important.’ Although a sequence
may have minimal story significance, Mori lingers on it to convey character
perspective. We spend two pages in the POV of one of William’s love rivals, his
gaze roaming over Emma. (Bonus points for not feeling leery.)

The main conflict only materialises
two-hundred pages in, when William discovers his father’s opposition to his
love. While two-hundred pages is short in relative terms (the series totals
around two-thousand), in absolute terms two-hundred pages is a long time. Reading
this in monthly serial form, this may have infuriated me. In omnibus form, the
story does not seem padded. Mori lingers on the opening days of Emma and
William’s courtship; she develops, and gets us comfortable with, the status
quo, and only then does she drop the main conflict.

Then again, this late-coming central
conflict may have resulted from the necessary improvisation of serial plotting,
rather than intention. For some of the first volume, it seems the central
conflict will not be familial/societal opposition, but a love triangle. Hakim,
an Indian prince, stays on Williams estate (doing all those zany things Indian
nobles do: elephants, etc.). He crushes on Emma, just like William. Here we have
entirely conventional conflict for a romance. But soon Mori drops this plot
thread. (Maybe she picks it up in later volumes.) Perhaps she saw ‘love
triangle’ as too conventional, or maybe it didn’t sufficiently mine the
Victorian setting, like class-prejudice does, or maybe she realised her Indian
Prince was too nice of a character to seriously vie for William’s
lady-love.

While the manga has an overall slow pace,
each panel invites the reader to linger, not for their abounding detail (they
are quite minimal), but their silence and stillness. Although the
panel-to-panel progress of Emma
produces the illusion of movement, many of the individual panels seem captured
instants, unmoving.

Mori uses long sequences of panels absent
of sound effects. The comics’ theorist, Scott McCloud, writes that sound
creates time in a static image. How can sound, a phenomenon with duration,
exist outside time? If a sound effect exists within a panel, we subconsciously
match the duration of the panel to the duration of the sound. The total absence
of sound, however, does not make a panel feel shorter, but unending, as there
is no time-frame to limit the image. Emma
often forgoes sound effects, which invites the readers to linger on images.
This is not a languorous lingering, like looking at a very slow motion, but as
one would linger looking at a painting.

More than for its story, I recommend Emma, for sequences like those I have
just mentioned. The plot is serviceable, but conventional. Emma’s tone sells the book more than its story. One can find
countless renditions of Victorian-flavoured interclass-love elsewhere, and with
equal competency. Its tone of slow calmness is not so prevalent.